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This Movie Brought to You By Child Exploitation: Slumdog Millionaire Child Actors Still Live in Poverty

Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in “Slumdog Millionaire,” are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for one year’s work and Ismail earned 1700 pounds ($2414), “less than many Indian domestic servants“

…

Ismail is in fact “worse off” now, as his “family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin.” Ali lives nearby — in a “hut.”

Spare me the “that’s a relatively good wage” excuse, because its not, or the “at least they’re enrolled in school now” bs, hungry kids can’t eat books. All of that misses the point.

Fox Searchlight and/or Danny Boyle could have taken care of these kids, I mean really taken care of these kids, with little to no effort.

A passport to the US/UK with a sponsor of citizenship , $10,000 and a non glamarous but respectable job wouldve taken a simple phone call. Hell, they didn’t even have to make the phone call, they have assistants for that type of stuff.

Its particularly pathetic considering that this movie is about Indian children growing up in poverty.

Within minutes, a couple emerged from the crowd and approached him. They gave him cakes and said they’d take him away to start a better life. ‘I thought they were maybe social workers or religious people,’ he told me.
But Aamir’s food was drugged and when he became drowsy, the couple put him in a rickshaw and took him to the city’s municipal hospital, which is where the real nightmare began

For at the hospital, a doctor was paid to amputate one of his healthy legs. Now speaking in the third person, as if to pretend it didn’t happen to him, Aamir tells me ‘the child’ was in ‘great pain’ after the operation. ‘The leg is removed here,’ he says, pointing to his own stump and grimacing. His limb had been severed mid-calf, leaving him without a foot.

Now in hiding after being rescued from the hospital by a charity, Aamir is one of hundreds of Indian children deliberately crippled by gangs so they can earn extra money begging. He still struggles to talk about his experience.